True to its name, Norton AntiVirus Plus presents you with all the expected antivirus features, plus a lot more. You get a powerful firewall, a spam filter, a password manager, hosted online backup, a vulnerability scanner, and more. Independent testing labs give it top marks, and it turned in mostly excellent scores in our own hands-on testing. Yes, it costs more than some competitors, but you get the Norton name and decades of malware-fighting experience. Like Bitdefender AntiVirus Plus, it’s an Editors’ Choice winner for antivirus software.
At $59.99 per year for a single license, Norton is more costly than many antivirus tools. The most common price for a single standalone antivirus license is about $20 lower. More than a dozen of the products I’ve reviewed cost that lower price, among them antivirus apps from Bitdefender, Trend Micro, and Webroot. For many of those, a $59.99 subscription gets you three licenses.
For years Norton didn’t offer multi-license pricing for this antivirus. If you wanted to protect two PCs, you’d buy two licenses, costing almost $120. For that same price, you could upgrade to Norton 360 Deluxe. That upgrade would get you five full suite licenses, five licenses for Norton Secure VPN, 50GB of hosted online backup, and more.
Norton has now rectified that pricing oddity. If you need an antivirus to protect multiple devices, you can pay $84.99 per year for five licenses. That’s still on the high side, given that the median price for a five-license antivirus subscription is $69.99 per year. But on a per-device basis, it’s a big improvement. Note, too, that Norton gives you way more than basic antivirus protection.
In addition to the expected Norton Antivirus Plus full-on tech support, Norton offers a Virus Protection Promise. If the antivirus can’t remove a malware infestation even after you follow all the recommended steps, experts will log into your computer remotely and fix the problem. In the unlikely event they can’t sort things out, you can apply for a refund. This promise does require a commitment on your part. It only applies if you’ve signed up for automatic renewal. McAfee and Check Point offer similar guarantees.
All current Norton security programs, including this one, include online backup. With the standalone antivirus, you just get 2GB of online storage, but that may be enough to securely back up your most important files. By default, it backs up your Documents folder.
During the installation process, you activate the cloud storage for your backups. That’s a nice touch, as it lets Norton start backing up your most essential files with no effort on your part. You also get the opportunity to install not one but three Norton browser extensions in your default browser. That sounds like a slog, but over the years Norton has managed to streamline and automate this process to an amazing degree.
Other early events include installing Norton’s secure browser and password manager. After a welcome and an optional tour of features, you’re ready to roll.
You start with the My Norton app, which manages the various components of your Norton installation. Previous versions of My Norton have been decorated with a hazy outdoor scene reminiscent of the nature-scene backgrounds in Panda Dome Essential and the rest of the current Panda product line. With the latest version, you see an artistic pic of a desk, complete with a keyboard and houseplant.
The main My Norton window manages five components: Device Security, Software Updater, Secure Browser, Cloud Backup, and Password Manager. In addition to offering one-click access to each, it displays the status. For example, on my test system, it showed Cloud Backup as installed but never run and offered to set up the Password Manager.
At the bottom is a list of additional apps and services available for purchase: Driver Updater, Utilities Ultimate, AntiTrack, and Secure VPN. When I initially installed Norton, this list had six more items, three of them related to LifeLock. I assume the changes shook out when I ran LiveUpdate.
Clicking Device Security opens the main window of the local antivirus, which should look familiar to Norton aficionados. It’s mostly white, with text and icons in green and black. Big panels show your status in five areas: Security, Internet Security, Backup, Performance, and My Norton. Rather than opening a new page, clicking one of the first four options slides the row of panels down to reveal more options. For example, clicking Security displays icons for Scans, Live Update, History, and Advanced. The last panel simply takes you back to My Norton.
After installation, be sure to run a Live Update. Even though the status panel indicated my software was current and up to date, the Live Update found and installed additional updates. You should also launch each of the browsers that you use and at least install the Norton Toolbar. You can also add Norton Safe Search, which marks dangerous search results, and Norton Home Page, which puts Safe Search and a collection of quick links on your home page. As noted, Norton makes installing all the extensions extremely easy, automating what it can and leading you through the actions required of you.
When you click the big Security panel and then click Scans, Norton offers the expected Quick, Full, and Custom scan choices—and a lot more. Choosing Custom Scan lets you queue up a variety of tasks, including LiveUpdate, Backup, and several performance tasks. It’s a bit like the Smart Scan feature in Avira Free Security and Avast One Essential. Both Avast and Avira are free, and both belong to Norton’s parent company, Gen Digital.
If you think you may have malware even after a scan, you can launch a fresh scan with the aggressive Norton Power Eraser clean-up-only antivirus tool. A link in the final report screen for each regular scan takes you to Power Eraser; click it if you suspect the cleanup wasn’t complete.
On my standard clean test system, a full scan took two hours and 6 minutes, a half-hour longer than the current average. That isn’t a big worry, as you only need a full scan right after installation to root out preexisting conditions. In addition, Norton clearly performed some optimization tasks during that first scan. A repeat scan ran in just 25 minutes, shaving 80% off the scan time.
The Norton Insight scan checks all your files and assigns a trust level to each. It also displays each file’s prevalence among Norton users and how much impact it has on performance. That scan ran quickly on my test system and flagged 88% as trusted, 10% as good, and 2% as unproven.
If you run into any trouble at all with Norton, the Diagnostic Report scan may help you solve the problem. Even if it doesn’t, the details from the report should help when you contact tech support about the difficulty.
Every antivirus claims it will protect you, but how do you know it works? One way to verify that claim is by checking results from independent labs around the world, labs whose research experts do nothing but test and evaluate security programs. The labs choose the programs they think are significant, and the security companies decide whether it’s worthwhile to pay the testing fee. When an antivirus appears in reported results, you know it’s worth a look. All four of the labs I follow report on Norton, a clear indicator of its importance.
Testing experts at SE Labs capture real-world malicious websites and use a replay technique to hit each of the selected antiviruses with precisely the same attack. The lab offers certification at five levels: AAA, AA, A, B, and C. Norton received AAA certification, along with McAfee, Panda, Microsoft Defender Antivirus, and almost all the tested antivirus tools.
Where most of the labs report rating levels or numeric scores, London-based MRG-Effitas uses something closer to a pass/fail system. Unless an antivirus exhibits near-perfect protection, it simply fails. In the all-types malware defense test, an antivirus that immediately defeats every attacker receives level 1 certification, while those that remediate all malware activity within 24 hours reach level 2. Norton and ESET NOD32 Antivirus passed at level 2, as did Avira and Avast. Bitdefender, Malwarebytes, and Microsoft managed level 1 certification. In a separate test focused on banking Trojans, only half the antiviruses passed, Norton among them.
Researchers at AV-Test Institute look at antivirus tools from three different angles. Naturally, they rate the app’s essential ability to protect against malware attacks. But they also rate each app’s effect on system performance, and they examine how successfully it avoids naming valid programs or websites as malicious (false positives). Antivirus utilities can earn 6 points for each of these criteria, for a maximum of 18 possible points. Norton lost a half-point in the performance test, taking it to 17.5 points, which is still sufficient to earn the title Top Product. A few other contenders attained a perfect 18, among them Avast, AVG, and Bitdefender.
An antivirus that passes one of the many tests performed by the AV-Comparatives team receives Standard certification. Those that do better than the basics, or much better, can receive Advanced or Advanced+ certification. Norton participates in all three tests I follow from this lab and received two Advanced+ certifications and one Advanced. Avast, Avira, and Bitdefender Antivirus Plus (along with a few others) achieved a trifecta, with Advanced+ in all three tests.
With all the different scoring systems, it’s hard to get an overall feel for a product’s lab results. I’ve devised an algorithm that maps all the results onto a 10-point scale and combines them to yield an aggregate score. Norton’s aggregate score of 9.7 points is the best among apps tested by all four labs, with Avast close behind at 9.6. Bitdefender and McAfee managed a perfect 10-point aggregate score based on results from three labs.
Even when the labs offer positive and plentiful results, I still like to get a feel for the program’s malware protection skills using my own hands-on tests. My basic malware protection test starts when I open a folder containing a collection of samples I collected and analyzed myself. Like most competitors, Norton started examining these samples right away. Rather than frantically popping up a separate notification for each detection, it simply displayed a notification that the Auto-Protect component was busy processing threats.
When last tested with a different sample set, Norton wiped out 93% of the samples during this initial examination and went on to detect all the remaining samples either immediately on launch or during their installation process. Its 100% detection and 9.9 of 10 score beat out all others tested with that set of samples.
This time around, Norton’s performance was very different. Its initial examination of the samples I exposed to it only removed 55% of them. Continuing the test, I launched the surviving samples. Norton missed some of them and allowed a few that it did detect to plant executable files on the test system. Its current score of 89% detection and 8.7 points is a big drop. Given Norton’s plentiful and excellent lab scores, along with its history of high scores in this test, I’m treating this as a fluke. If it doesn’t do better next time, there will be consequences.
The current set of samples may be a bit tougher than the previous one. No antivirus achieved 100% detection. Even so, Malwarebytes Premium reached 9.8 points. Yes, Guardio and PC Matic also achieved 9.8 points, but only because I modified the test for their unusual requirements. McAfee and Webroot AntiVirus managed 9.4 points, tying for second place.
Those hand-analyzed samples from my malware collection necessarily stay the same for quite a while because it takes me weeks to obtain and curate a new set. For a view of how each antivirus handles the most current malware, I start with a feed of recent malware-hosting URLs supplied by testing lab MRG-Effitas.
Even though the URLs are no more than a few days old, I usually find quite a few have gone dark since discovery. For those that still work, I note whether the antivirus prevents the browser from visiting the dangerous page, wipes out the malware payload, or does nothing at all. In summing up the results, I give equal credit for URL blocking and for download deletion.
Norton blocked some URLs by replacing the browser page with a big, red warning. When the browser protection didn’t prevent all access, the Download Insight component vetted every download. It analyzed all files that reached the download stage, marking a small number as safe, removing many others as dangerous, and asking for my attention regarding a couple that seemed suspicious (I let it remove those in the last group). A careful check of those marked as safe revealed some that were deemed malicious by dozens of other antivirus tools.
In past iterations of this test, Norton frequently reached 100% protection. This time around, just as in the previous test, it only reached 93% protection. That 93% score isn’t terrible, but 10 programs have done better, topped by Guardio, Sophos Home Premium, Trend Micro, and ZoneAlarm with 100%.
Writing a malicious program that can steal personal data without triggering antivirus defenses is complicated. Creating a website that looks like Capital One or some other bank and hoovering up the login credentials of hapless netizens who don’t notice the chicanery is simple. Phishing fraudsters put up fake versions of financial sites, online games, and even dating sites, capturing as many passwords as they can before the site gets blacklisted. When one site gets busted, they just spin up another fake.
Yes, a clever consumer can learn to spot these fraudulent websites, but we can’t all be vigilant all the time. Phishing detection assistance from the antivirus is most welcome.
Because phishing sites are so ephemeral, a successful defense can’t rely solely on blacklists. For testing purposes, I gather reported phishing URLs from sites that track such things, making sure to include some that are too new to have been analyzed and blacklisted. I launch each suspected fraud in a browser protected by the antivirus I’m testing and simultaneously in Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer, using just the phishing protection built into each browser. I discard any page that doesn’t load correctly in all four browsers, and I verify that each page is a true phishing fraud, a fake version of a secure site that actively attempts to capture login credentials.
Norton blocked some phishing pages with a red warning page labeled Dangerous Webpage Blocked. For a handful, the warning said, Malicious Site Blocked. In past tests, I’ve run into a warning from Norton’s Scam Insight for a few of the sample pages. This type of warning notes that while the page has no known threats, it asks for personal information, and it has suspicious characteristics. Scam Insight didn’t make an appearance this time.
Norton was long a champion at detecting phishing frauds, so much so that years ago, I used it as a touchstone to measure the accuracy of other antiviruses. When last tested, it fell down on the job, however, with just 88% detection. This time around, it’s back in the running, scoring 97%. Another dozen antivirus tools have scored at that level or better, though, and five of those reached 100% detection, among them Trend Micro Antivirus+ Security, McAfee, and Norton’s own Norton Genie, a tool devoted specifically to detection of scams and frauds.
Norton encourages you to install the Norton toolbar with Norton Safe Web in all your browsers. That means when you search using any popular portal, you see green, orange, red, or gray icons next to the links in search results. As you might guess, these identify safe, iffy, dangerous, and unknown URLs. You can point to an icon for a pop-up with more details and click the pop-up for a full report on the link.
The web markup system also applies to links in Twitter and Facebook feeds and in web-based email. Norton doesn’t clutter your feeds with icons, but it highlights any dangerous links in red. Pointing at a highlighted link triggers a popup warning.
Those who are willing to shift away from their favorite browser can gain additional security by using Norton’s own Chromium-based Secure Browser. It comes with the password manager installed, as well as Norton Home Page and Norton Safe Search. Norton Safe Web doesn’t appear because this browser’s built-in Web Shield takes its place.
Quite a few extras appear on the built-in Security & Privacy Center page: Norton AntiVirus, Privacy Guard, Web Shield, Private Mode, Password Managers, Extension Guard, and Privacy Cleaner. It’s worth noting that Avast and AVG offer their own versions of Secure Browser, with even more features.
While this looks like an impressive collection, most of these extras don’t offer a lot. Clicking Norton AntiVirus just opens My Norton, and Password Managers pointlessly lets you swap between using Norton’s password manager and the browser’s built-in password feature or turn both off. Private Mode is the equivalent of Incognito in Chrome, InPrivate in Edge, and the like. As for Privacy Cleaner, it’s almost identical to Chrome’s Clear browsing data feature and reached by the same Ctrl+Shift+Del key combo.
Extension Guard is a bit different, promising to block untrusted browser extensions. Of course, these extensions would first have to get past the real-time antivirus. I didn’t find a way to test this feature.
I mentioned that Secure Browser doesn’t come with the Safe Web extension that Norton supplies for other browsers. Rather, its Web Shield component takes the place of Safe Web. In testing, I found that it used language like Chrome’s when warning about dangerous sites. Could it be relying on built-in protection from Chromium? I gathered 20 phishing URLs from my earlier test, choosing ones that Chrome missed but Norton caught. Chrome still missed them all, while Web Shield caught all that remained active.
Out of all the Secure Web special features, Privacy Guard is the most significant. It’s an ad and tracker blocker with more flexibility than most. Out of the box, at its Basic level, it blocks items that “disrupt your browsing experience.” Notching up to Balanced level ads blocking of more ads as well as social media ads. At the Strict level it blocks ads, trackers, browser notifications, and browser fingerprinting.
Note that if you do select Strict blocking, the browser pops up a plea asking you to relent and not block “partners that fund us through…user-friendly ads.” In fact, when I ignored the warning, it still refused to turn on Strict blocking. In any case, this feature is both less flexible and less informative than what some competitors offer. For example, Bitdefender’s Anti-Tracker breaks down blocked ads by category and lets you choose its response at the category level. Tracker defense in the IronVest privacy tool shows which trackers it blocked and lets you exempt any specific tracker or site from its scrutiny.
Quite a few security tools protect against ransomware by preventing all unauthorized programs from modifying protected documents. Panda goes further, even preventing unauthorized read-only access. Norton’s Data Protector feature prevents malicious programs from modifying documents in specified directories.
That’s an important distinction. The more common protection against all unauthorized programs means you may have to add a new video editing suite or word processor to the trusted list. Norton leaves them alone because they’re not malicious. By the same token, it’s hard to test. It didn’t react to my unauthorized tiny text editor or to my file-encrypting test program because they got a pass during previous reviews. Only when I hand-tweaked those two into suspicious, never-before-seen versions did Data Protector react.
To put Data Protector to a proper test, I had to use real file-encrypting ransomware. Norton’s real-time protection eliminated all those samples on sight, so I turned off ordinary real-time protection, copied the samples back to the test system, and launched them one by one.
Data Protector completely missed one sample, allowing it to encrypt hundreds of files. But remember, this is Data Protector alone, with no help from the regular real-time or behavioral antivirus detection. There’s a good chance behavioral detection would have saved the day. Another sample refrained from any ransomware behavior and hence didn’t set off any alarms.
As for the other 10 ransomware samples, Data Protector detected them all and completely defeated half of them. Of the others, some encrypted a few files in unprotected folders. Others encrypted everything in the Documents folder but were stopped from deleting the originals. And a couple left ransom notes despite their lack of success. In other words, none of the detected samples caused any lasting harm.
Remember, this test takes place with all normal real-time protection turned off. Data Protector normally works alongside other protective layers. The fact that it detected suspicious behavior by all but one of the samples is impressive.
Most security companies reserve firewall protection for their security suites, but Norton doesn’t follow that path. This antivirus includes a full-scale firewall, which both protects against outside attacks and prevents misuse of your internet connection by local programs.
When personal firewall utilities first came on the scene, they totally relied on the user to decide whether a given program should get the privilege of connecting to the network. Typically, they’d bombard the poor user with queries involving too much detail. Should dr-jan-itor.exe be allowed to connect with 199.59.243.225 using port 8888? Some users just clicked Allow every time. Others clicked Block every time until doing so broke something important—then they switched to clicking Allow every time.
Relying on the uninformed user for these important security decisions isn’t smart. Instead, Norton uses a huge online database to configure network permissions for a vast number of known good programs. Of course, known bad programs get quarantined on sight.
As for unknowns—programs that don’t fit either category—Norton’s behavior-based detection system puts them under heightened scrutiny. If it finds that the unknown program is misusing its network connection or otherwise misbehaving, it tosses the program in quarantine, where it belongs. Webroot likewise puts unknown programs under enhanced scrutiny, but it also journals all actions by the program and rolls them back if the program proves to be a stinker.
In testing, I found that Norton’s firewall does occasionally display an alert when a sketchy program attempts access. For example, my tiny hand-coded test browser got a warning because it’s not digitally signed and because Norton’s vast network has seen it very few times. As with the firewall in ZoneAlarm Extreme Security, pop-up alerts are rare. If you see an alert from the firewall, pay attention because it’s an unusual occurrence.
Firewall protection, and security suite protection in general, isn’t much use if a malicious program can turn it off or kill it. I always run a simple sanity check, trying various methods to shut down protection using techniques available to a malware coder. Norton doesn’t expose important settings in the Registry, so I couldn’t just find the protection switch and change On to Off, the way I recently did with G Data Internet Security.
I got an Access Denied message when I tried to terminate Norton’s three processes. Likewise, I couldn’t stop or disable either of its two Windows services. Protecting essential processes and services makes sense, but not all firewalls manage it. I had no trouble finding ways a malware coder could disable Vipre Advanced Security, for example.
If you dig into the firewall component’s settings, you’ll find them plentiful—and possibly baffling. Most users should leave these strictly alone, but just looking doesn’t hurt. A peek will reveal settings for the Wi-Fi Security feature, which goes way beyond merely informing you when you connect to nonsecured Wi-Fi. Norton actively looks for and foils man-in-the-middle attacks, DNS spoofing, content tampering, and other network-based attacks.
Alongside firewall protection, Norton gives you exploit protection, typically a suite feature, at the standalone antivirus level. This component monitors network traffic for patterns matching exploit attacks and blocks them below the browser level. By default, it blocks all traffic from the attacking IP address for 30 minutes. I had to dig into firewall settings and turn off that automatic blocking to perform my hands-on exploit testing.
This test uses exploits generated by the CORE Impact penetration tool. I launch about 30 exploits against the test system and note the security utility’s response. Norton’s scores have varied wildly in past tests. Its detection has gone as high as 85%. When last tested, it detected just 38% of the exploits, and this time around it came in at 29%. Scores in this test have been trending downward generally. The best recent detection-scorers are Vipre with 55% and Bitdefender with 53%.
That’s not to say the exploits breached my test system. Even the exploits that weren’t caught didn’t succeed, as the vulnerabilities they attack have been patched. It’s possible that Norton has dropped detection of older exploits whose targets are no longer current.
The current Norton lineup gives you online backup at every level, starting with the standalone antivirus reviewed here. Granted, you get just 2GB of online storage with the antivirus, but that may be enough to back up your most essential files. Backup serves as the ultimate security against ransomware and any other destructive attacks that might get past antivirus defenses.
Even if you don’t bother with setting up the backup component, you get the benefit of a basic, default backup plan. Out of the box, Norton backs up your documents, pictures, and other important files to cloud storage, doing its duty when the computer is idle. Still, you’d be wise to examine the default backup settings and see if you need any changes. The process starts with verifying what to back up. Norton offers to back up nine general file types: Pictures, Music, Financial Files, Video, Office Documents, Email, Contacts, Internet Favorites, and Other file types. Video and Email aren’t enabled by default, which makes sense given the small amount of storage. You can tweak the backup by adding or excluding folders, and you can also edit the list of file extensions associated with each type.
Next, you choose where to keep your backed-up files. Online storage is the default, but you can also choose any local, removable, or network drive to hold local backups. If you use a cloud storage service that shows up as a drive in Windows Explorer, you can even use that for a backup destination. Because Norton supports multiple backup jobs, you can save your files in more than one location.
The final step involves defining when to run the backup job. If you’re using online storage, just accept the default setting, Automatic. In this mode, Norton backs up new and changed files any time the computer is idle. For other backup jobs, you can choose a weekly, monthly, or manual schedule. Manual is the best choice if the destination is a removable drive since you must make sure the drive is ready.
Now that you’ve defined what, where, and when to back up, finish up by clicking Save Settings and Run Backup. The initial backup may take a while, but once it’s complete, Norton will keep things up to date in the background.
The backup system maintains multiple versions of files, giving you the option to go back to an earlier version as needed. The 10 previous versions of each file that it stores don’t count against your 2GB total. Backups older than 60 days get purged, but the system always keeps the latest and next-latest versions.
Restoring backed-up files is just as simple. Choose a backup set, decide whether to restore all files or just some of them, and pick a destination for restored files. By default, they go to their original location, potentially overwriting existing copies, but you can select any folder you like for restored files. The program does warn (sensibly) against restoring into a non-default folder that is itself part of a backup set. When restoring individual files, you can choose a previous version, if available.
Norton’s suites offer significantly more storage for your backups. This ranges from 50GB for the Norton 360 Deluxe suite to 500GB for the top-tier Norton 360 with LifeLock Ultimate Plus. Note, though, that there’s no option to simply buy more storage. If you need more, you must upgrade to the tier that offers enough for you.
Norton includes a Software Updater component, but it’s not integrated into the main antivirus. Rather, you reach it from the expanded My Norton platform. Given that Avast and Avira both feature a similar component, perhaps its appearance in Norton shouldn’t be surprising.
It may not be obvious, but keeping software updated is a security issue. Hackers poke and prod popular programs, looking for security weaknesses and exploiting them to enhance the malware they code. Developers of these programs respond by working up a patch for the security hole. And you get absolutely no benefit from that patch unless you install the update.
After a quick scan, the Software Updater reports on any programs that need your attention, flagging each with a risk level. On my test system it found five programs with available updates. Failing to update Firefox from version 86 to 119 would be a high risk; not updating Opera from 103 to 104 would be a low risk.
You really don’t have to worry about those risk levels, though. Just click the big Update button and sit back while Norton does the work. Once you’ve taken care of any missing updates, consider flipping the Auto-Update switch. In this mode, Norton checks periodically and installs any updates it finds.
Chances are good that your personal webmail provider filters out spam before you ever see it and that your business email system filters spam at the server level. If you’re one of those rare few who still need a local spam filter, Norton can help, though. Most companies offer antispam as part of a security suite, but Norton puts it in the antivirus. You will have to dig; there’s no big icon for antispam. Rather, you must open Settings and choose Antispam.
Norton filters out spam from POP3 email accounts and integrates with Microsoft Outlook. In Outlook, it automatically moves spam to the Norton AntiSpam folder. If you use a different email client, you must create a message rule to divert marked spam messages into their own folder. You can allowlist your correspondents so their mail never gets marked as spam or blocklist known spammers. It’s a simple system for those who need it.
When you install Norton AntiVirus, you also get Norton Password Manager. This isn’t precisely a bonus since you can get Norton Password Manager for free, but it’s nice to have it integrated into My Norton. Read our review of the standalone app for full details. Briefly, Norton Password Manager handles basic password manager tasks such as password capture, password replay, and filling web forms, and it can sync across all your Windows, Android, and iOS devices. It includes an actionable password strength report with automatic password updates for popular sites. However, it lacks advanced features, among them secure password sharing, digital inheritance, and multi-factor authentication.
Many programs configure themselves to launch every time you boot up the computer, and it doesn’t always make sense to have them sucking up system resources while you’re not using them. Norton’s Startup Manager, launched from the Performance page, lists those startup programs, along with information about resource usage and prevalence in the Norton community. You can reversibly disable any program, so it doesn’t launch at startup or let it launch after a small delay.
Modern Windows versions work in the background to undo the disk fragmentation that naturally occurs as you create and delete files. Even so, Norton offers its own Optimize Disk feature. When you launch this component, it first analyzes the drive for fragmentation, only proceeding if defragging would be worthwhile.
If your PC seems sluggish, try launching the File Cleanup tool, but don’t expect the thorough cleaning you get with a full-scale tune-up utility. The cleanup component simply deletes Windows temporary files and browser temporary files.
Norton AntiVirus Plus misses the highest scores in some of our hands-on tests, but we give more weight to tests from the independent labs, where Norton uniformly gets excellent scores. Unusually for a mere antivirus, it includes a full-blown firewall and exploit protection. Bonus features include a spam filter, a software updater, and online backup. In the past, we’ve withheld the Editors’ Choice designation from Norton because of its stingy one-device no-discount pricing. Now that this limitation has been lifted, Norton joins Bitdefender Antivirus Plus as an Editors’ Choice winner.
When the IBM PC was new, I served as the president of the San Francisco PC User Group for three years. That’s how I met PCMag’s editorial team, who brought me on board in 1986. In the years since that fateful meeting, I’ve become PCMag’s expert on security, privacy, and identity protection, putting antivirus tools, security suites, and all kinds of security software through their paces.
Before my current security gig, I supplied PCMag readers with tips and solutions on using popular applications, operating systems, and programming languages in my “User to User” and “Ask Neil” columns, which began in 1990 and ran for almost 20 years. Along the way I …
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